📄✨ PDF Compare App

🚀 A modern PDF Comparison Tool built with Django (Backend) & React + Vite (Frontend).
Easily upload, compare, and track differences between two PDF files with an intuitive UI and history feature.

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✅ Features

• 📤 Upload two PDF files for comparison
• 🔍 Extracts and compares text to highlight differences
• 📝 Stores comparison history in the database
• 📊 View previous comparisons and reload them
• 🎨 Clean React UI with Material UI and React-PDF

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🛠️ Technologies Used

Component	Technology	Purpose
🧠 Backend	Django + DRF	API creation, storage, and comparison logic
💾 Database	SQLite	Lightweight storage for comparisons
📄 PDF Processing	PyPDF2 (PyMuPDF)	Extracts text content from PDFs
🖼️ Frontend	React + Vite + MUI	UI, table, and PDF rendering
🔗 State Mgmt	React Hooks	State handling for file comparison

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🏗️ Architecture & Design Choices

• Decoupled Frontend & Backend
  • frontend/ – React + Vite app for UI
  • backend/ – Django REST Framework for APIs
• Static File Integration – React build served via Django
• Reusable APIs – Upload, Compare, and History endpoints
• Simple DB – SQLite for local storage (can be replaced with Postgres/MySQL)

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🔍 How It Works – User Journey

1. 📄 Upload PDFs – User selects two PDF files
2. 🧠 Text Extraction – Backend extracts text from both PDFs
3. 🔍 Comparison – Differences are computed and summarized
4. 🗃️ History Storage – Comparison details are saved in DB
5. 📜 Results Display – Side-by-side PDF view with difference summary

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⚙️ Setup Instructions

🔹 1️⃣ Backend Setup

1. Go to backend folder cd backend

2. Create virtual environment

• python -m venv venv
• source venv/bin/activate # Windows: venv\Scripts\activate

3. Install dependencies pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Create .env file (inside backend/)

• DJANGO_SECRET_KEY=your_secret_key
• DJANGO_DEBUG=True
• DJANGO_ALLOWED_HOSTS=127.0.0.1,localhost

5. Run migrations python manage.py migrate

6. Start the backend server python manage.py runserver

🔹 2️⃣ Frontend Setup

1. Go to frontend folder cd frontend

2. Install dependencies npm install

3. Start development server npm run dev

4. Build for production npm run build

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🚀 Running the App

1️⃣ Start backend: python manage.py runserver

2️⃣ Start frontend (dev mode): npm run dev

3️⃣ Access the app: 🌐 http://127.0.0.1:8000

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🙏 Acknowledgment

Made with ❤️ using Django + React + Vite + MUI to demonstrate a full-stack PDF comparison workflow.

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